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- HOT SPRINGS, South
Dakota (Reuters) - An adult woolly mammoth mummified 23,000 years ago under
Siberia's frozen tundra will be dug out of the permafrost and may one day
be cloned, an international team of scientists said on Thursday.
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- In a scenario worthy of the fictional, cloned dinosaurs
in the "Jurassic Park" movies, French explorer Bernard Buigues
said the intact soft tissues and the hair of the Jarkov mammoth held out
the possibility of recovering intact DNA.
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- "It will be interesting to know the habits of this
animal and what he was doing in this place that was a very difficult place
to live," Buigues said in a teleconference with reporters from southwestern
South Dakota, a center for fossil finds.
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- "In the pictures we have, you see all the kinds
of hair that the mammoth has. The colour is intact," said Buigues,
who is affiliated with the National History Museum of France. "The
smell of the skin is also there."
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- Most likely, any attempt to clone the extinct woolly
mammoth -- an example of one of the six or seven known species of mammoth
that roamed the Earth through the Pleistocene era -- would be done by using
a genetically similar Asian elephant as the gestating mother, said Larry
Ageneroad, a geology professor at the University of Northern Arizona, who
will join the team in Russia in September.
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- The Jarkov mammoth, named for the local tribesmen who
discovered the submerged beast and who previously removed its valuable
tusks, is a male who died at age 47, Buigues said. The exposed head has
decomposed, but the body remains intact under the permafrost, or permanently
frozen tundra.
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- The six-week excavation project, to be filmed by the
Discovery Channel for broadcast in March 2000, will begin in September
as temperatures cool and will entail digging out a 33-ton block of permafrost
containing the mammoth's body.
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- The block will be flown by Russia's largest helicopter
to the ice caves in Khatanga, Siberia, where a subfreezing laboratory will
be fashioned for scientists.
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- This adult specimen is different from others found in
Siberia and elsewhere because scientists will be able to examine grass
and other flora that were preserved with it, and possibly recover organs
and even sperm.
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- Many of the plants mammoths were known to eat on the
mountainous steppes of what is now the North American Rocky Mountains and
Siberia are known to still exist, but the mystery of the mammoth's extinction
persists, the scientists said.
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- "In general, we know a lot about the woolly mammoth
from (mostly skeletal) specimens found in France, Spain and Russia,"
said Dick Mol, another member of the team who is affiliated with the Natuurmuseum
in the Netherlands.
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- "If we can find more material of the woolly mammoth,
including soft parts such as the ears and the tail, we can learn much more,"
he said.
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